Young and Tonnies

Sam Lyon

Final USP3 Reading Response

5/30/09

I.M. Young (1990) and F. Tonnies (1887)

In the chapter “City Life and Difference” Young offers a challenge to Tonnies earlier argument that society as a negative mechanism that should be deconstructed and replaced with its more organic predecessor, the community. Both Young and Tonnies agree that the formative essence of community is uniformity. But while Tonnies sees community as being consensus based, Young sees community as conflict based. Tonnies describes the community as a “harmony of wills” (247), a natural development that is based in the family and land ownership. Individuals interact according to a set of shared morals, customs and religion that they acquire naturally from living with each other in a close group of families (248). By contrast, Young sees the community as the product of “fusion of subjects”, the melding of a group of individuals into a unified entity. In this sense, community naturally represses social difference because it is formed through the exclusion of individuals who have values or experience with which the group does not identify (227). Young defines the polity, the urban population, as actually being made up of a diverse body of individuals who do not all share a common experience or a common set of values (227). Young asserts that the social order in the city is governed by a plitical system. It is unclear whether Young believes that system should be democratic. What is clear in Young’s argument is that Young sees community, repressive of group difference, as an inappropriate substitute for welfare capitalist society in a democratic system because it does not take into account or provide voice for the different groups that make up the polity.